Dan Dare – Mercury Revenant

Tim Booth’s Mercury Revenant, written and drawn in eighteen parts in Spaceship Away 33 through 40 (whilst Booth continues to produce episodes of his longer-standing Parsecular Tales) is really no more than a short story, a lineal action tale whose main point of interest is that it brings Mercury back into the overall story, albeit as not much more than a background.
Once again, Booth is operating in the early years of the Dan Dare continuity. Given that this tale starts with the test run of a prototype MH-fuelled fighter ship (lockwave control having bounced right up to our-world-date with onboard computers doing the job automatically), it’s post-Operation Saturn, but the Xmas-based setting makes it hard to slot in before Prisoners of Space – and there’s no room after it.
Basically, Dan and Dig do a high-speed test run to Mercury, where a new Spacefleet satellite, the local equivalent of Mars 1, is anchored on the dark side of the planet, under the command of Major Tom (sic) D’Arcy, previously seen in Marooned on Mercury. There’s a fairly isolated research station on the surface, in the temperate zone, where one very familiar red-haired Professor is learning more of the Mercurian language and botany, aided by Urb ut-Urthos, another veteran of the rather ramshackle official Mercury story.
Jocelyn’s delighted at the prospect of having Dan for Xmas (rather a contrast to her obvious preference for Hank Hogan in Booth’s other stories) but the kybosh is put on that planet when a menace turns up. Something is on a collision course with Mercury 1, impact time approximately twenty-four hours away.
Booth makes good use of the original Venus story here. At first, the object appears to be the derelict Kingfisher, but D’Arcy identifies it as its sister ship, the Kookaburra. He goes on to relate how the Kookaburra, and its other sister-ship, Kittiwake, was part of the reserve fleet for the 1996 Earth Invasion of Venus, but was badly hit by a Treen squadron, evacuated and forced out into space.
It appears that Kookaburra has actually drifted, comet-like, out as far as the Kuiper Belt before sling-shotting back towards the sun, on a course that takes it plumb through the space occupied by Mercury 1.
It’s an ingenious set-up but unfortunately, Booth is trying to be too clever by half here. Firstly, the whole point of D’Arcy in Marooned on Mercury was that he had been taken from Kingfisher when it was destroyed, months before Dan Dare ever got to Venus, and that he was the Mekon’s captive all the way from then until Mercury, four years later, so how the hell does he know the minutiae of the battle?
And whilst Dan’s universe is one in which interplanetary travel can be achieved at speeds far greater than those of our universe, for Kookaburra to travel from Venus orbit to the Kuiper Belt and back to Mercury orbit on nothing better than Impulse Power (which isn’t generated beyond the Asteroid Belt), in only five years, is stretching the boundaries of scientific plausibility more than somewhat.
Still, we have a menace, and we have Dan and Digby in a spacecraft, with Jocelyn Peabody advising them on scientific matters. This is going to be fun!
And Booth has one more complicating factor up his sleeve. Over Sir Hubert’s objections, Kookaburra was carrying a highly-illegal, utterly secret weapon, an only-in-the-case-of-utter-defeat Doomsday Weapon, set to wipe out all life north of the Equitorial Flame Barrier on Venus, so we”re talking a real Mercury-buster here. Sort of ups the stakes, really.
After that, though, the story is pretty much Saturday morning serial fun. On Peabody’s advice, Dan boards Kookaburra to set off all its port missiles, with Digby on watch to shoot them out of the, uh, sky. The kick of this one-sided boost throws the stricken ship off-course and away from Mercury 1, but unfortunately all this does is throw it onto a collision course with Ray-Law, the Mercurian capital city.
So Dan has to go back, to divert the ship to land, safely, by parachute power (another aspect of the Venus invasion) in the temperate zone, only that doesn’t work and Dan gets dropped on the hot side, in a lava lake, sinking and burning in molten lead! It’s wonderfully reminiscent of Sir Hubert and the Professor having to be rescued from the Flamebelt in the original story, with everybody galloping to the rescue, and Booth’s final touch is both a steal from, and a foreshadowing of The Ship That Lived, when our old pals Hank and Pierre do a deus ex machina rescue, having been on leave, lava rafting.
There’s just time for a grand old slap-up Xmas feast, complete with Digby’s traditional concern for just how soon they’ll be mixed up in summat dangerous again (it’s got to be Prisoners of Space, though after a successful trial like this, how come these MH powered ships disappear without trace in favour of the ‘Performing Flea’?)
A fun, but light tale, of a kind that would have fitted in fairly neatly in scope with the monochrome shorts of Keith Watson’s first year.
So that’s two more unofficial tales that are good enough to swell out the continuity. There are signs that Tim Booth’s Persecular Tales may be nearing an end, of some sort at any rate, so I’ll probably be back next year at some point, to comment upon that as a whole. And at least one new Dan Dare adventure will have started by then, which looks like it will be from a fresh creator.
It goes on.